September 18, 2008

Urinal lift on a terrace kills business

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:55 am
Urilift

City hotel Queens in Amersfoort has a serious problem that is basically killing their business. The city council decided to place a urinal, albeit a nifty one that rises above ground at 10 pm, right on their terrace. Can you picture taking a leak while people are having a drink on a terrace watching you? Would you want to be watching while having your drink? Ickeepoo. Well, other people don’t want to either, and so the hotel owner is pissed (pun intended).

After having spent hundreds of thousands buying and renovating an old building on the popular Groenenmarkt, the city council chose her outdoor terrace as the place for the urinal. And according to the owner, Paula Brouwer, the day before she was to receive the terrace permit, there was talk of a urinal, and her permit has been tied up in red tape ever since.

The city council came up with a deal: we’ll give you the permit, but you have to close your terrace at 10 pm. All the other terraces are allowed to stay open until 1 am, so imagine how much business she’d be losing. She has refused and has lawyered up. Why does this have a maffia feel to it? It’s also proof positive the city screwed up.

(Link: ad.nl, photo: urilift)

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September 9, 2008

A car with huge speakers to annoy everyone

Filed under: Automobiles,Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:11 pm

DJ car

Dutch artist Olaf Mooij built a car with the sound system on the outside. In fact, he is standing in front of two turntables on this photo. His DJ Mobile is designed to be used as a driveable PA system, which you park, and then operate from a DJ platform while standing up through the open sunroof. It was inspired by the Faithless song ‘God is a DJ’ and I think it’s cool.

(Link and photo: gizmodo.fr, merci Alix!)

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August 24, 2008

East India Company themed bicycle bags

Filed under: Bicycles,Design,History,Weird by Branko Collin @ 9:59 am

Does steering your bike into Dutch traffic make you feel like you’re navigating a stormy ocean, hundreds of miles away from the nearest shore? Are you consumed by dark longings of burning villages on Java? Does the idea of paying shareholders with pepper and cinnamon instead of cold hard cash turn you on? Relive the days of the Dutch East Indian Company with these handsome VOC bicycle bags!

Quoth the manufacturer:

The “Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie” (often abbreviated till VOC) was an extreme successful Dutch Company which transported goods oversea. Transporting goods is for many Dutchmen still a daily job, with this difference that nowadays it takes mostly place by bike. Enough reason for Basil – the producer of bicycle bags – to translate this into an unique concept: the double bag VOC! This VOC-bag has an archaeological tinge and refers to the period of the VOC, the time the Dutch ruled the seas.

Basil will show the double bag VOC at Eurobike 2007 in Friedrichshafen, Germany, from August 30 till September 2. No word on when it will be sold.

Via Dagelinks (Dutch).

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August 15, 2008

Emergency car help strictly for the highly educated

Filed under: Automobiles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:43 am
triangle

An insurance company in Dordrecht offers an emergency help service that caters to people with high vocational education, university level education and middle and upper management personnel. The company National Academic claims it can offer prices that are lower than that of the competition, ANWB (the Dutch automobile association) and Route Mobiel.

Although the car insurance has been around for two years, the emergency help can now be offered separately from the car insurance, which is why it’s in the news. The prices are lower because apparently the target group “is more careful with their things and has regular maintenance done more often.” They are also not clear on who falls under middle and upper management, which gets sorted on a request form. If someone lies about this fact, they will served but told to look elsewhere next time.

And yet this year if I remember correctly, giving women lower car insurance rates because they have less accidents was ruled sex discrimination. Just so you know. I can imagine one good reason why the not so highly educated take care of their stuff better: money, and not intelligence.

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July 14, 2008

Smokers to get smell of cigarettes back in cafés

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 10:55 am

With the ban on smoking in cafés comes the inevitable stink of us non-smokers. We reek of sweat and of not knowing how to have a good time, just the way our Protestant government wants it. A company in Groningen wants to remedy the former. Rwin Showtechniek rents out a device that will spread any of an array of 150 scents across a room, including the smell of a good Havana, and of cigarettes. Shown here is the Multi-Scent 1, which can disperse one scent through a room, but Rwin Showtechniek claims to be able to spread multiple scents at once, which probably means they also bought a Multi-Scent 3 or 6.

Via Z24 (Dutch).

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July 10, 2008

Students prefer Donald Duck magazine over serious newspaper

Filed under: Comics,Weird by Branko Collin @ 7:43 am

Left-leaning newspaper of record De Volkskrant came to a shocking discovery (Dutch): it’s no longer the students’ darling. Instead, university students are flocking to a magazine they know from their elementary school years, Donald Duck.

The “merry weekly” is the most popular periodical among students, beating magazines and newspapers like Intermediair and NRC.next which consider students and former students to be part of their target audience. So says the Nationaal Studentenonderzoek (National Student Survey) held by marketing agency StudentServices from Rotterdam. The agency questioned a whole campus worth of students (1,775 to be precise).

Editor-in-chief of Donald Duck magazine Thom Roep is not surprised though. “An earlier study already showed that we’re passing magazines like Playboy as a popular men’s magazine,” he told De Volkskrant.

When I was a student our house was subscribed to the Volkskrant. In a “red-pink” town like Nijmegen a subscription to a lefty paper was almost mandatory. As it happened I also read Donald Duck magazine quite a lot but that was because I considered it homework, as I was trying to sell comics scripts to the magazine.

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Baby panda fed by cat in Artis zoo

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:32 am
Baby panda

A baby panda rejected by its mother has been adopted by a domestic cat which is suckling the animal along with its own young, Amsterdam’s Artis zoo said yesterday. “The young panda is doing well under the circumstances. For it to survive, it needs to get enough food and grow. We will see if this is the case over the next few weeks,” the zoo said in a statement.

The animal, an endangered red panda, would need to be suckled by the cat for at least a few weeks, it said, adding that it was not unique for a wild animal to be adopted by a domestic one. The panda and another sibling were initially accepted by their mother but a day later were found to have been abandoned. They were also suffering from hypothermia.

“A cat belonging to one of the zookeepers had just given birth and so we decided to try to get it to suckle the pandas,” the statement said. The second panda, was too weak when it was placed with the ca and did not survive. Red pandas, which are only slightly larger than domestic cats, are an endangered species found mostly in the eastern Himalayas. Many zoos around the world have breeding programmes.

(Link: news.yahoo.com, photo cyberpresse.ca)

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July 5, 2008

Zone 5300, Summer 2008

Filed under: Comics,Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:43 pm

Who’s heard of Lian Ong recently? The comics artist received aclaim with her album Horizon in 1998, winning an award at the Stripdagen Haarlem. The comics book took 8 years to create, and she didn’t feel like repeating that stunt again, so she became a Tai-Chi teacher.

Another (sigh) autobiographical story by Simon Spruyt, this time about his carreer as a comic artist-god (illustration right). Revealing.

Fool’s Gold is looking for subsidies to bring out a CD with their large collection of gay songs, and are asking readers who know which ways to walk toward the state’s purse to help them out. This issue was the first time in years that Fool’s Gold writes something I’d read about before on the web (the phonautogram), a clear indication of what a good nose the two editors have for the weird and the wonderful—or a clear indication that I surf the wrong websites.

10 bonafide ways to lose your punk credibility. Number 7: Run for mayor of San Francisco (Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedies). Finish behind a drag queen called Sonic Boom Boom.

Graphical biography in which the devil tells the life story of American writer and explorer W.B. Seabrook, alleged eater of man flesh, sexual deviant, inventor of the word “wow,” and popularizer of zombies. Written and drawn by two of the magazine‘s editors, Tonio van Vugt and Marcel Ruijters.

Detectives should stay away from time travel (illustration left), that would save us a lot of problems. In Joshua Peeters’ De Rechtvaardige Rechters (The Just Judges) our heroes who do not look like another staple of Flemish comics—and we’ll keep denying it till you believe us—try and retrieve the famous panel by the Van Eyck brothers.

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June 27, 2008

Three-year-old already in tax system

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:42 am
Blue envelope

The Dutch tax office has a motto, which in English translates to “We can’t make it more pleasant, but we can make it easier”. And everytime they screw up – which has been a lot in 2008 so far – the media make fun of this ‘the road to tax hell is paved with good intentions’ slogan. Major computer problems have been their biggest worries, never mind that some staff are, well, incompetent.

The tax folks have sent a tax return to a three-year-old child, saying that they should provide them with their bank account number in order to get tax money back from 2004. The child was born in 2005, so you do the math.

This kind of mistake happens often. As a business, I recently waited for two separate returns of value added tax (small amounts, mind you) that I was owed. I got three letters telling me they all of a sudden could not find my bank details – which is rubbish, I assure you – and to fill in these three forms, all identical. The first return had two letters and the second one had one. I received the first return twice – they haven’t figured that out yet – and the second one once.

Here’s one (in Dutch) from March of a 6-year-old who was asked to cough up EUR 29,000.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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June 11, 2008

A white affair at future Amsterdam Central Station

Filed under: Design,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:22 am
cs1.jpg

Maybe the small man or boy on the right is not white, but Arnoud de Jong of the Amsterdam Central Station website doubts it. Apparently, once the station will be renovated, it will be populated by white yuppies.

De Jong took a look at the municipal website and found that the ‘artist impressions’ did not provide a single identifiable person of foreign origin. No Muslims, no one even remotely religious looking or multicultural, while one in every three residents of Amsterdam fits the ‘non-Western foreigner’ bill. Maybe they’ll be riding donkeys.

And then there’s the women, as one woman pointed out in the comments. Young, thin and long-haired. The one in the foreground was probably taken from some catwalk. Not a single one of them is dressed for work, while the men are in suits. This has to have been the ‘work’ of a heterosexual white man.

If this is what Central Station plans to look like, I will continue to use the modest yet modern satellite station Sloterdijk where real people take the train.

(Link and Illustration: nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl)

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